Contact Center Mystery Shopping &

Customer Satisfaction Research

Why contact center mystery shopping?

Brands have personality. They are animated by the customer experience. Contact centers animate the brand. Call centers often form a critical first impression in the customer’s mind, and in many cases contact centers are the primary personification of the brand. In order to make sure this first impression and all subsequent contacts are aligned and animate the brand in a positive way, it is critical for contact centers to identify, measure and motivate the right sales and service behaviors – those which influence the customer’s impressions is a profitable way, yielding the most return on investment. Contact center mystery shopping is an excellent tool to measure and motivate the right behaviors – behaviors which animate the brand in a profitable way.

In a contact center setting, the performance of the agent weighs heavily on customer loyalty. In a recent study performed by Kinesis, we have found that the Net Promoter score is strongly related to satisfaction with the representative who handled the call.

In calls where the satisfaction rating of the representative was under 4 (on a 5-point scale) the Net Promoter Scare was negative 100%, compared to positive 89% for calls where the agent satisfaction rating was “5”.

Contact Center Mystery Shopping

Research Purposes

Contact Center Mystery shopping can serve several purposes, among them:

In-Bound Customer Experience:

Service and sales execution and consistency are monitored with in-bound calls or live chat to both measure and motivate sales and service behaviors.

Out-Bound Customer Experience:

Out-bound mystery shopping is performed by seeding call lists with contact information for mystery shoppers. Service and sales execution and consistency are monitored, again, to both measure and motivate sales and service behaviors.

Lifecycle/Cross Channel Shops:

Highly trained researchers interact with the company over a period of time using multiple channels, providing valuable feedback about service performance throughout the customer lifecycle across multiple touch points, giving managers valuable context in which to evaluate the alignment of the contact center with other channels.

Moments of Truth:

Not all customer experiences are equal. Some experiences are far more important, in fact, they are critical. Critical interactions, either positive or negative, that form a lasting impression on the customer in terms of how they perceive the brand, ultimately having a powerful effect on the customer relationship. These critical interactions are moments of truth, moments of truth that make or break the customer relationship. Mystery shopping provides contact managers a unique tool to test the customer experience in these moments of truth.

IVR Usability:

Contact center mystery shopping is also an excellent tool to test the usability of your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system’s configuration. Interactive voice response systems weigh heavily on the call center customer experience. Usability contact center mystery shopping sends researchers through the IVR following different paths to test programming changes. Configuration of the IVR should be tested at least every six months.

Competitive:

Shopping competitors allows our clients to benchmark their sales and service behaviors relative to their competitors.

Contact Center Mystery Shopping Objectives

Research objectives for our contact center mystery shopping programs are customized to each client; broadly many of our core research objectives include:

Align employee performance with service standards.

Align call center service standards with customer expectations.

Test sales and service behaviors using predetermined scenarios and under controlled conditions.

Evaluate ease of IVR navigation.

Track performance and maintain a consistent customer experience over time.

Evaluate problem resolution skills.

Identify which service behaviors have the strongest influence on purchase intent or loyalty.

Provide alerts for both extremely good and poor customer experiences.

Obtain actionable information to improve the customer experience.

Benchmark the customer experience against the competition.

Identify top service performers who can be used as leaders or role models.

For more information about what impresses customers positively as a result of an interaction with a contact center, click below: